


Point Blank

by little_murmaider



Category: Metalocalypse
Genre: A g-g-g-ghost?!?, Babby Murderface screams in a diner, Bruce Springsteen References, Gen, Pre-Canon, Pre-Klok, The worst Mother's Day ever, some light body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 02:09:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14631891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_murmaider/pseuds/little_murmaider
Summary: Bang bang, baby, you're dead.





	Point Blank

**Author's Note:**

> [I love Bruce Springsteen more than life itself](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQcxrt9-6ZI).

William didn’t often think of his mother. Why would he? He didn’t _know_ her. He didn’t know what she looked like, how her voice sounded. He didn’t even know her name. The only thing he knew for certain was that she was dead.  
  
But she came to mind that Sunday. His grandmother bulldozed into his room at the buttcrack of dawn, just as she’d bulldozed into every other facet of his life, caring little for the collateral damage. Her presence was suffocating. Controlling. Ripped the bones from his back with its teeth. She wanted to know everything he was doing, all the time. He was not permitted to piss without her permission. When he was in her orbit, which was always, he was flattened by the gravitational force of her overprotectiveness.   
  
That morning was no different. Tearing off his sheets, shoving him out of bed, she demanded he get dressed. She was wearing a polyester blue floral sundress that fit her like a sausage casing. William had the passing, horrible thought they were going to church. But no. They were going to the diner. Not their usual diner, the crappy one a half mile north of their mobile home park where he’d once found a wad of gum at the bottom of his orange juice glass. The _good_ diner. The _fancy_ diner. The diner off Route 9, its bright chrome exterior lit up in neon red and blue beneath an elegant glass-blown sign. The one that served wine. The one with the salad bar.  
  
As he was stuffed into the nicest article of clothing he owned (an itchy, too-small suit from Bradlees) and cattle-prodded into his grandfather’s Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera, a primal, wordless rage churned in William. With each injustice, his fury grew fiercer, wilder. The heat was obliterating. The air conditioner was broken, the windows closed but for a crack. The seatbelt cut into his neck. The fancy diner had a wait. He was not allowed to play with the cigarette vending machine. The vinyl seating of their booth made the backs of his legs sweat. The waitress smelled like cheese. Everything, and everyone, worked in harmonious tandem to make him miserable. A tantrum brewed on the horizon like an oncoming storm.  
  
But then, the big one. The final indignity that caused the tumultuous dark clouds in his brain to open. After placing their order, his grandfather reached into the interior pocket of his suit jacket.  
  
“Willy asked me to hold onto this for you, Stel,” he said, withdrawing a small pink envelope. “Picked it out all by himself.”  
  
As he slid the envelope across the formica table, he glanced at William and winked. Winked? His grandfather was not a winking man. William did not wish to be party to whatever scheme his grandfather cooked up. His frown deepened, his annoyance doubled. His grandmother opened the envelope with the grace of a wild boar and pulled out a greeting card. Girly. Covered in flowers. _Not_ something William would have picked out. Not that it mattered, because his grandmother had done _nothing_ to earn whatever she just received. Her fat face glowed with misplaced delight. When she smiled she looked older, more weathered, an old boot left out in the rain.  
  
“Oh, _William!_ You’re scho _thoughtful!_ ”  
  
She laid the card down, and William saw it. The ultimate betrayal. His grandfather had forged his signature, with _out_ his ex _pli_ cit consent. Worse, still, was the realization of what the card signified. This was not an out-of-the-blue trip to the fancy diner. This was an _excursion_. This was a Mother’s Day excursion. This was a Mother’s Day card. This was Mother’s Day.  
  
Ugly, intense feelings he could not identify bubbled up from the bottom of the muck. Complex stuff, too complex for a kid to understand. But he recognized the big ones. Anger. Humiliation. Hate. Hate as smothering and omnipresent as the day’s humidity. All of it coalesced into a mighty, righteous thunderclap of retaliation.   
  
“You’re not m **Y MOOOOOO** ** _OOOOOOOOOOOOOOM_**.”  
  
It was not a small feat to bring a bustling diner to a dead stop, but William accomplished it. A fork clattered to the floor. Coffee cups shuffled awkwardly in their saucers. A hundred eyes made a bead on their table. William felt relieved. Justified. He awaited his grandmother’s response with a smarminess beyond his years.  
  
The reaction he got was not the one he expected. He expected violence, for her bulbous, gnarled knuckles to smack him across the face for mouthing off. To tell him _yeah, he’s right, she’s not his mom. But she’s all he’s got, because no one else in the world wanted to take in a worthless piece of snot like him_. But she just stared at him. Quiet. Bewildered. William did not believe she had a heart. But if she did, he would swear he broke it.  
  
“I juscht wanted one nische day,” she mumbled. “I can’t have _one_ nische day?"  
  
Life returned to the diner, and a new crop of feelings bobbed to the surface. Guilt. Shame. Remorse, for upsetting his grandmother as deeply and intentionally as he just did. Contempt, for himself, that he was capable of _doing_ such a thing. It was too much for his little body to handle. The day and the diner and his suit and the card and his grandma and the rage and his mom who was not there and never would be. He wanted nothing more than to vanish. To be just as dead as his dead mom.  
  
He squirmed out of his seat, ducking to the ground beneath their table, kneeling in a puddle of old syrup, wriggling between both sets of his grandparents legs until he found freedom, and then he was gone. Passed the gawking diner patrons. Passed the rotating glass case of pies and desserts. Passed the ancient cigarette vending machine in the foyer and out, out to the parking lot. Fast as his chubby little legs could carry him. Gravel crunched beneath his cheap loafers. Ahead of him was the highway, cars zipping by in a steady stream. He tripped, and fell. His knees and forearms stung from the impact. His rage subsided. The ground burned beneath his palms.   
  
Only, it wasn’t the same black parking lot from earlier. He clenched his fists, and his hands filled with blistering white sand. He took a breath. The air carried the faint scent of salt. He heard the crash of waves, but saw no ocean. The highway was gone. The diner was gone. His grandparents were gone. In all directions stretched an endless expanse of beach. The sole point of interest stood before him.   
  
A VFW Hall.  
  
He’d been to halls like that before. He accompanied his grandfather to his monthly meetings at his local post on nights his grandmother worked an overnight and they couldn’t find a sitter. He’d been dragged, against his will, to various hall-hosted community events. Bingo nights. Tricky Tray auctions. Anniversary parties. All boring. All terrible. But this structure, identical to so many halls he’d seen before, had him in its thrall. He brushed himself off and, transfixed, entered.    
  
Within, a party. Silver streamers pinned in arches against the ceiling swayed in the air-conditioned breeze. Phantom shadows slithered around tables covered in platters of half-rotted cold cuts. In an alcove, a faceless band played, the music tinny and distorted, as though someone were spinning a record backwards in another room. William felt unsettled. Then, a wash of calm, unlike any he’d felt in his life. Fingers combed through his hair. Squeezed, with affection. He heard a voice, a voice known and unknown.   
  
“There’s my special little guy.”   
  
A woman. She pulled him into her, gently, so his face pressed into the side of her thigh. The warmth of her skin radiated through the thin material of her white cotton dress.  
  
“Getting into trouble?” she asked.   
  
He nodded.  
  
“Good trouble, I hope.”  
  
He nodded again. He threw out his arms and latched to her. Permanently, if he could.  
  
The band counted off, and a new song began. Slow. Mournful. A dirge. The shadows filtering throughout the room enveloped the tables and shoved them aside, leaving a wide, empty space at the center of the room.  
  
“Oh, I _love_ this song _,_ ” the woman purred. She tugged on William’s shoulder. “Dance with me?”  
  
He clutched her harder, desperate. He shook his head no.   
  
“Aw, come on, baby.” Her hand drifted down his arm and slipped into his, and suddenly he was compelled to follow her to the ends of the earth. “Come dance with your mama.”  
  
They were alone on the floor, adrift in a black sea, but William felt safe. Serene. Happy. He smushed his face into the woman’s doughy belly. He wanted to burrow into her flesh, coil inside her like a tapeworm. He wanted to fit himself between her lungs, feel them compress and retract with every breath.  
  
“This is nice, isn’t it? This is a nice day.”  
  
Outside, a bang. The music stopped. The shadows dispersed. The front doors blew off their hinges, crashed into the ground, and disintegrated. In his shock, in a hunt for comfort, William looked up. But what he saw was not a woman. It was not human. It had feet, and legs, and an abdomen, and arms, and shoulders. But no head. No face. Poised on top of a slender, impossibly long neck, was nothing but a continuously ripping sheet of paper, water damaged and yellow and warped. Wispy flutes of it peeling off her form and rose into the air, and dissolved. The sheet downshifted, formed a smiling, horrible mouth.  
  
“I just wanted to have a nice day.”  
  
And then he was back in the diner parking lot, his grandfather’s hands around his neck, throttled, growling through his teeth how _he’s gonna learn a thing or two about respect_ \--  
  
“Lay off, Thunderbolt.”  
  
It was his grandmother, her hand already on the handle of the passenger side door of the Oldsmobile.   
  
“Let’sch go.”  
  
His grandfather released him, gaping pitifully at his wife.  
  
“But, you wanted--”  
  
“I already schettled up with the waitressch.” She sounded as William had never heard her before: Defeated. “I juscht want to go home.”  
  
The door clamped shut. His grandfather’s glare let him know more punishment was imminent. He cursed lightly, dug around his pockets for his keys and crossed behind the car to the driver’s side. William waited a moment before climbing in. Caught his breath. Touched his cheek. Still warm.  
  
A slip of yellow paper slapped him in the face. Across the highway was a swath of spindly pines, and somewhere between the trunks, something glimmered. A flash, like the sunlight’s reflection off a sideview mirror. William squinted. The light took shape. A woman, white dress floating in a non-existent breeze. Faceless. Gleaming with despair.  
  
His grandfather honked the horn, and William jumped. He turned away just for a moment. A fraction of a second. It didn’t matter. He knew. She was gone. 


End file.
